JOHNNY
MNEMONIC

Description:Adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk
short story (available in his book Burning Chrome) for which Gibson himself
wrote the screenplay. Valuable top-secret electronic data would be stored in the
"wet-wired" brain of a human courier (played by Keanu Reeves), who then
transports the data from China to New Jersey as part of his last, most dangerous
assignment. —
Amazon.com

Cyberpunk godfather William Gibson's work finally makes it to the
big screen. Unfortunately it is too late and one wonders what
would have happened had his Hugo award-winning Neuromancer
been made into a movie shortly after its publication. The sad
truth is that we have already had buzzwords such as virtual
reality and cyberspace explained in (albeit lesser) films such as Lawnmower
Man.

Thus Johnny
Mnemonic lost much of the impact it could have had. The
situation is made worse by the presence of a wooden Keanu Reaves,
first time director's Robert Loggia's flat look to the movie and
Gibson's screenplay that tends to over explain events and terms.
Had Neuromancer explained anything it would have had none
of the impact it had.

The character Johnny
Mnemonic, a data courier (data is stored directly unto his brain) who literally
suffers from an info overload, is a metaphor in Gibson's world of humanity
in general. This becomes clear as the plot progresses: the information stored in
his head contains the cure for a disease which is basically a product of our
information overloaded times.